Bait­fish are small fish that are sold to recre­ational fish­er­men, who usu­ally im­pale them on a hook and use them as live bait for big­ger fish. In this ar­ti­cle, I dis­cuss why I think that lob­by­ing for stric­ter bait­fish reg­u­la­tions in the U.S. can be an effec­tive in­ter­ven­tion.

Farmed bait­fish suffer not only dur­ing farm­ing, but also when trans­ported and kept by whole­salers, re­tailers, and fish­er­men, where con­di­tions may be worse. They also suffer dur­ing an­gling.

Most farmed bait­fish are sold when they are about 1 year old.[1]

Ne­glect­ed­ness:

I was able to find very lit­tle ev­i­dence of an­i­mal ac­tivism di­rected to­wards stric­ter bait­fish laws. The is­sue seems to be very ne­glected.

Tractabil­ity:

Live bait­fish use is pro­hibited in some parts of Europe, Canada and the U.S. due to con­cerns about in­va­sive species, spread of dis­eases, and an­i­mal rights. This is an in­di­ca­tion that lob­by­ing for stric­ter reg­u­la­tions could be tractable.

Coun­ter­fac­tu­als:

If the use of live bait­fish was pro­hibited, some an­glers would likely use ar­tifi­cial baits in­stead, but some would choose to use worms, leeches, or other an­i­mals as live bait.

Num­ber of bait­fish raised in the U.S.

Differ­ent sources seem to provide some­what con­flict­ing num­bers about the num­ber of bait­fish that are sold and pro­duced an­nu­ally. They range from 1 billion to over 10 billion:

Ac­cord­ing to the USDA’s Cen­sus of Aqua­cul­ture, over 1.17 billion bait­fish were sold in the U.S. in 2013.

One Arkansas farm boasts of hatch­ing (or “be ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing”) 1 billion golden shriners an­nu­ally. This seems to con­tra­dict the Cen­sus of Aqua­cul­ture, which claims that 523 mil­lion golden shin­ers were pro­duced in the whole U.S. in 2013.

Good­win et al. (2004) claim that “More than 80% of all bait­fish are farm raised, but there is a very sig­nifi­cant trade in wild-caught fish (Stone et al. 1997). The bait­fish in­dus­try ships more than 10 billion fish per year.” Since it’s cit­ing the ar­ti­cle in the point above, I’m guess­ing that the 10 billion figure is just an ex­trap­o­la­tion of the 6 billion figure for the whole U.S.

I haven’t found any ar­ti­cles cit­ing The Cen­sus of Aqua­cul­ture figure which makes me doubt its ac­cu­racy. The six billion figure for Arkansas from Stone et al. 1997 is widely cited. How­ever, it could be out­dated, es­pe­cially since the in­dus­try seems to be on the de­cline.

“Cur­rent and ac­cu­rate es­ti­mates of pro­duc­tion and value of bait­fish in the U.S. and the NCR are not available. The lack of ac­cu­rate pro­duc­tion es­ti­mates is the re­sult of in­con­sis­ten­cies in re­port­ing, differ­ent meth­ods of re­port­ing (i.e., gal­lons, dozens, pounds), use of differ­ent com­mon names for the same species across the re­gion, and difficulty in sep­a­rat­ing cul­tured bait­fish from wild har­vested bait­fish.”

Gun­der­son and Tucker (2000) also claim that there are dis­crep­an­cies be­tween the 1998 Cen­sus of Aqua­cul­ture and other sur­veys be­cause the cen­sus did not define aqua­cul­ture prod­ucts. Later cen­suses defined aqua­cul­ture prod­ucts more clearly but their defi­ni­tion might have differed from defi­ni­tions in other sur­veys.

Another ex­pla­na­tion for seem­ingly con­flict­ing figures is that the num­ber of bait­fish that are sold can differ from the num­ber of bait­fish that are hatched/​pro­duced due to:

Mor­tal­ity in farms. Mischke (2012), p. 223 sug­gests that bait­fish may have a mor­tal­ity rate of ~25% (“from fry to ju­ve­nile”).

Not sel­l­ing all the fish. Stone (2003) claims that “mar­ket­ing and dis­tri­bu­tion net­works are crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of a bait­fish farm, and in most years many more pounds of fish are raised than can be sold.”[2]

When it comes to the num­ber of in­di­vi­d­u­als, the bait­fish in­dus­try is com­pa­rable to the food­fish in­dus­try. U.S. food con­sump­tion is re­spon­si­ble for farm­ing of 3.9–7.8 fish per year per cap­ita, ex­clud­ing shel­lfish. 1–10 billion bait­fish pro­duced an­nu­ally trans­lates to 3-31 bait­fish pro­duced per year per cap­ita. How­ever, food fish tend to be much big­ger and rais­ing them usu­ally takes slightly more time.

Edit (Sept 15th, 2018): since the in­dus­try is on the de­cline, the num­ber is prob­a­bly closer to 1 billion than 10 billion. It also could have de­clined to be be­low 1 billion since the last es­ti­mates were made.

This ob­ser­va­tion is based on the same gov­ern­ment data that was crit­i­cised by Gun­der­son and Tucker (2000), so it’s un­clear how much it can be trusted. It’s also un­clear whether all the cen­suses col­lected data in a con­sis­tent way. For ex­am­ple, 2005 in­cluded 335 mil­lion feeder gold­fish into bait­fish calcu­la­tions but the 2013 cen­sus did not. Ac­cord­ing to Gun­der­son and Tucker (2000), “some gold­fish en­ter the bait­fish mar­ket, but a large part of the pro­duc­tion is used for feed­ing aquar­ium and pond fish and do not con­sti­tute bait­fish pro­duc­tion.“

Rea­sons for the pre­sumed de­cline are un­clear. One pos­si­ble rea­son is the in­creas­ing bur­den reg­u­la­tions (see Sen­ten and En­gle (2017) and Hilts (2018)). bait-up.com claims that bait­fish “are used less and less by an­glers for three sim­ple rea­sons. First, it is be­com­ing more difficult to find bait shops who carry min­nows. Se­cond, there is ad­di­tional time re­quired to keep them al­ive be­fore and dur­ing your fish­ing trip and third most live bait stor­age con­tain­ers are hard to use effi­ciently while fish­ing.”

If the bait­fish in­dus­try re­ally is on the de­cline, it de­creases the im­por­tance of the cause. How­ever, it may also in­crease tractabil­ity. The in­volve­ment of an­i­mal rights groups may be the fi­nal push that causes the in­dus­try to col­lapse or pre­vents it from re­cov­er­ing. It may also pre­vent im­ple­ment­ing plans to in­crease the scale of salt­wa­ter bait­fish aqua­cul­ture (cur­rently most of the farmed bait­fish are used for fresh­wa­ter fish­ing).

Mone­tary value

Lit­vak and Man­drak (1993) con­ser­va­tively es­ti­mated the re­tail value of bait­fish sold in Canada and the United States (both farm-raised and wild-caught) to be $1 billion an­nu­ally.

Ac­cord­ing to gov­ern­ment data, the to­tal value of farmed bait­fish sold in the U.S. was 63 mil­lion in 1993 and 29 mil­lion in 2013. As I un­der­stand, U.S. gov­ern­ment figures are lower than Lit­vak and Man­drak (1993) partly be­cause they are calcu­lat­ing the value of fish sold by farms rather than re­tail value, and they ex­clude Canada where wild-caught bait­fish is sold.

Other countries

I have found very lit­tle in­for­ma­tion about bait­fish farm­ing for recre­ational fish­ing out­side of the U.S. Ca­role and Kwa­mena (2008) claim:

“Fish and crus­taceans are raised and sold as bait all over the world. How­ever, bait­fish pro­duc­tion in most coun­tries is ei­ther small scale, in­ci­den­tal, or sim­ply serves to sell fish that are too small to meet food­fish mar­ket re­quire­ments. How­ever, the U.S. bait­fish in­dus­try pro­vides an ex­am­ple of bait­fish pro­duc­tion that has been de­vel­oped into a large and im­por­tant in­dus­try”

Ex­ist­ing regulations

Us­ing fish as live bait is already pro­hibited in some U.S. and Cana­dian states. Many other states have im­port and move­ment re­stric­tions. An overview can be seen in Kerr (2012). More de­tailed in­for­ma­tion about laws in each state can be found in this table.

In Scot­land, it is pro­hibited to use any live ver­te­brate as bait. Some of the dis­cus­sion lead­ing to the pro­hi­bi­tion can be found here and here. Switzer­land seems to have a similar reg­u­la­tion. In Poland, Den­mark, and the rest of the UK, it is only al­lowed to use bait­fish that is caught in the same wa­ters it is used. As I un­der­stand, this prac­ti­cally elimi­nates the pos­si­bil­ity of a bait­fish farm­ing in­dus­try.

What has been done

It seems that the main mo­ti­va­tion for ex­ist­ing re­stric­tions is pre­vent­ing the trans­fer of fish species and dis­eases be­tween wa­ter bod­ies, rather than an­i­mal cru­elty. Over­all, I was able to find very lit­tle in­for­ma­tion about any an­i­mal rights ac­tivists fight­ing for stric­ter bait­fish laws:

This ar­ti­cle claims that the ban in Scot­land was a “mas­sive first step” in PETA’s fight for pro­hibit­ing live bait in the rest of Bri­tain. I haven’t been able to find what PETA did though.[3]

“Ap­par­ently in Europe, be­cause of strong an­i­mal rights sen­ti­ments, the use of live fish for an­gling has been elimi­nated or severely re­stricted in some ar­eas. The im­pact of the an­i­mal rights move­ment on the fu­ture of bait­fish aqua­cul­ture in the U.S. is not pre­dictable, but it could pre­sent prob­lems for fish farm­ers in the fu­ture”

Next steps

Based on my in­ves­ti­ga­tion, I think that an in­ter­ven­tion in this area could be effec­tive. I would like to know whether or not other peo­ple agree. I am also un­sure how to pro­ceed if we were to con­clude that it was a promis­ing op­por­tu­nity. Maybe with some lob­by­ing the out­comes of some bait­fish-re­lated policy dis­putes (like this one) could in­fluenced. How­ever, I don’t have re­sources or ex­per­tise to do any­thing about it my­self. I thought I could send this text to some U.S. an­i­mal char­i­ties and ask if they would be in­ter­ested in pur­su­ing the op­por­tu­nity. Sugges­tions about what to do would be wel­come.

If some ac­tion were taken, I think we should be sen­si­tive to the fact that the bait­fish in­dus­try is the source of liveli­hood for many well-mean­ing peo­ple.

Notes

[1] The most pop­u­lar bait­fish are golden shin­ers and fat­head min­nows. Gun­der­son (2018) claims that most golden shin­ers are sold when they are 1 year old, some ear­lier, some when they are 1.5 years old (page 7). Based on fat­head min­now aqua­cul­ture de­scrip­tion in Gun­der­son and Tucker (2000), it seems that most fat­head min­nows are sold when they are about 1 year old as well (page 7).

[2] Similarly, this doc­u­men­tary claims that “bait­fish sales can fluc­tu­ate wildly” and that “the weather on four or five week­ends in the spring can de­ter­mine the prof­ita­bil­ity of the bait­fish op­er­a­tion for the en­tire year.”

[3] The ar­ti­cle cites PETA’s em­ployee Yvonne Tay­lor. If needed, maybe she could be con­tacted for more in­for­ma­tion.

Thanks for look­ing into this Saulius! I’d seen a few things re bait­fish and it has been on my list to look more into for a while. But this will raise its pri­or­ity—and make my task eas­ier by pro­vid­ing a lot of the un­der­ly­ing sources. I’ll dis­cuss this with some of the farm an­i­mal groups to see if they have ideas. In the mean­time, let me know if you find more info.

This EA Fo­rum post might be a re­ally good ex­am­ple of how EAs in­ter­ested in blog­ging and re­search can sup­port Open Philan­thropy Pro­ject. If you have any other ideas for top­ics like this, Lewis, shar­ing them could help other EAs help you in other ways.

I agree. I’ll aim to put to­gether a list of re­search Q’s I’m in­ter­ested in and share within the next month. Gen­er­ally posts of this form—pro­vid­ing data and in­for­ma­tion on a ne­glected is­sue—are the most valuable, though I try to read most EA posts re an­i­mal welfare ideas.

I would up­vote this twice if I could! I fol­low EAA stuff pretty closely and I haven’t heard this dis­cussed be­fore. How­ever, it seems like a highly im­por­tant, ne­glected, and tractable cause area. The most ex­cit­ing part in my mind is that progress has already started in some coun­tries and states, mean­ing that it could be very tractable.

I’d love to see a more de­tailed anal­y­sis of the coun­ter­fac­tu­als. For ex­am­ple, what per­centage of bait fish will be re­placed by ar­tifi­cial baits vs an­i­mals? If you used worms or other an­i­mals as bait, would you have to use more bait, or would it be a 1-1 re­place­ment?

I’d also love to see some anal­y­sis about how ex­ist­ing laws came to ex­ist. Who lob­bied for these poli­cies? Were they easy to pass, or were they con­tro­ver­sial?

This is a great ex­am­ple of the util­ity of the EA fo­rum—well re­searched and ac­tion­able. I’ll do what I can to make sure this is on the radar of oth­ers in EAA.

Thanks. I en­coun­tered the 6 billion figure by ac­ci­dent when do­ing re­search about fish farmed for food for ACE. I won­der if there are other ar­eas like this where a huge num­ber of an­i­mals are hurt that an­i­mal ac­tivists are un­aware of.

I don’t have good an­swers to your ques­tions, but I’m go­ing to do a bit of a brain dump here and an­swer them to the best of my knowl­edge, in case some­one would find it valuable.

what per­centage of bait fish will be re­placed by ar­tifi­cial baits vs an­i­mals? If you used worms or other an­i­mals as bait, would you have to use more bait, or would it be a 1-1 re­place­ment?

Ar­tifi­cial baits seem to already be more pop­u­lar. E.g. see http://​www.an­gler­sur­vey.com/​files/​2012/​10/​AS3-1.png (“live bait” here means live bait­fish, worms leeches, frogs, etc.). Although one text I read said that in­ter­net is bi­ased to­wards ar­tifi­cials baits be­cause they are used by peo­ple who take fish­ing more se­ri­ously (and there­fore talk about it on in­ter­net more). So the sur­vey might have a se­lec­tion bias as well. I have a hunch that peo­ple who use bait­fish would be more likely to switch to other types of life bait, rather than ar­tifi­cial bait. Also, if farm­ing of live bait was banned, some would catch live bat­fish for them­selves. That is prob­a­bly bet­ter than farm­ing though.

Be­fore I read Peter Singer, I used to fish with my father. From ex­pe­rience, I can tell that if they switched to worms, many more worms and mag­gots would be used than bait­fish. E.g. see the amounts in https://​www.worms­di­rec­tuk.co.uk/​acat­a­log/​den­drobaena.html. We would keep mag­gots in the fridge, some­times would hook sev­eral of them and would buy more than needed just to be safe. I might write a sep­a­rate ar­ti­cle about worms and mag­gots as bait some time later. I do think that they suffer less (both, be­cause they live shorter lives be­fore be­ing used, and they are less sen­tient). But it could be that they are very stressed in those con­tain­ers. So yes, it’s pos­si­ble that coun­ter­fac­tual is even worse.

By the way, maybe some ques­tions like this can be an­swered by just go­ing to a nearby fish­ing or bait store and ask­ing some ques­tions. E.g. how many fish and how many worms do peo­ple usu­ally buy? I wish I could’ve done that while writ­ing this, but I don’t live in the U.S.

I’d also love to see some anal­y­sis about how ex­ist­ing laws came to ex­ist. Who lob­bied for these poli­cies? Were they easy to pass, or were they con­tro­ver­sial?

Some of the links that I put in the ar­ti­cle partly an­swer this ques­tion, es­pe­cially for Scot­land. It seems that these laws are always con­tro­ver­sial, fish­er­men don’t want re­stric­tions and peo­ple who care about ecol­ogy want them. E.g. see this 90 page risk re­port about ecolog­i­cal risks of im­port­ing one species of bait­fish from Arkansas to Min­nesota- https://​files.dnr.state.mn.us/​aboutdnr/​re­ports/​leg­is­la­tive/​2018-min­now-im­port-re­port.pdf The length tells me that it is an im­por­tant is­sue for some peo­ple. In North Amer­ica, a lot of rules were im­ple­mented af­ter an out­break of viral hem­or­rhagic sep­ticemia (VHS) in Great Lakes and some other wa­ters in 2005-06. Some de­tails about reg­u­la­tion changes can be seen at this web­site https://​www.out­doornews.com/​search/​bait­fish+rule It seems that reg­u­la­tions are always done at state level and in­sti­tu­tions like “Ver­mont Fish & Wildlife Board” are re­spon­si­ble for them.

I’m ex­tremely skep­ti­cal of this and strongly in­clined to make a bet against this info be­ing ac­cu­rate. Cur­rently con­sid­er­ing what ex­actly I’d be will­ing to put money down against. My in­tu­ition is that these figures might be off by a fac­tor of ten or more.

Pos­si­ble. It could be that the in­dus­try in­flates the num­bers be­cause they want to seem big­ger than they are. Note that bait­fish is not even the most pop­u­lar type of bait.

One thing to con­sider though is how many bait­fish peo­ple take per fish­ing trip. After a brief search, I haven’t found ex­act num­bers but this web­site is ad­vis­ing:

Re­quest a dis­count when pur­chas­ing in bulk. In­jured min­nows may be sold at a dis­counted rate, but fish that are in­jured rarely thrive af­ter a change in en­vi­ron­ment. In­stead, re­quest a free dozen for ev­ery 10 dozen that you pur­chase.

So I imag­ine that fish­er­men who do buy bait­fish, buy a lot of it. I also read that they of­ten don’t use them all and throw the rest into a lake, even though that causes ecolog­i­cal is­sues and ev­ery­one is ask­ing fish­er­men not to do it.

In gen­eral, I un­der­stand your in­tu­ition and I will prob­a­bly think about this more later.

I’m not sure how to look into this more. Note that the 1.17 billion figure is from the U.S. Gover­ment re­port so that should be de­pend­able, at least for the lower bound. I think some more in­for­ma­tion could be gained by go­ing to a bait­shop, look­ing around and ask­ing some ques­tions (how many fish av­er­age per­son buys, is the in­dus­try on the de­cline, etc.). I my­self can not do that be­cause I’m not in the U.S.

I’ve just no­ticed that my text looks weird on mo­bile phone. I wrote it in google docs and pasted to EA fo­rum. Is there any quick way to fix it? In case any­one has trou­ble read­ing it, you can also read it here.